Abstract/Summary

Although Estonia is at about the same latitude as Shetland – Lerwick is at 60.15 and Tallinn is at 59.44-
the country has many intensively managed arable landscapes with a few raised bogs and a high forest
cover. This is partly because of more extensive fertile soils, and partly because the climate is more
suitable to arable farming. It is therefore a useful exercise to examine the structure and composition
of these landscapes and to compare them with similar situations in Great Britain (GB) to determine
whether intensive agriculture has produced convergent landscapes.
In GB an Environmental classification was used to separate the flat plains of East Anglia, with a
relatively continental climate and fertile soils and associated intensive arable agriculture; from the
rest of the country with more variable altitudinal ranges and soils. In Estonia, with less pronounced
environmental gradients, a project on defining High Nature Value farmland provided a reliable
estimate of the distribution and character of intensively managed agricultural land. The methodology
involves an expert system to identify the landscape ecological character of agricultural land and will
be described in the paper.
The databases available from the two countries will be analyzed to provide quantitative descriptions of
the structure and composition of the relevant landscapes in the two countries. From field observation,
it is apparent that similar methods of intensive agriculture have produced comparable prairie type
landscapes. These have resulted from the removal of linear features, small habitat patches and point
elements for increased agricultural efficiency.